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A BBC documentary set to air later this week shows moving footage of monkeys mourning one of their own babies.

But the dead monkey seen on the first episode of the ‘Spy in the Wild’ series is, in fact, a life-like robot, complete with cameras behind its eyes, that was accidentally dropped by one of the langur monkeys during filming in India.

The group of monkeys mistakes the robot infant, which is first seen sitting on a log while clutching a broken branch, for one if its own.

When one monkey tries to carry the infant off, it accidentally drops it, apparently causing the group to go into mourning. Monkeys slowly approach the ‘corpse’ while trying to determine if it is alive before gathering around it, comforting each other in the process.

“We felt this calm and silence coming over them,” senior producer Matthew Gordon told the Daily Mail. “All the noise they were making at the beginning just went completely silent and then they hugged each other.”

The robots capture previously unseen behaviour of animals in the wild. Other animals to be featured in the series are otters, wild dogs, crocodiles and ostriches.